[jasonkester]

It's probably telling that his code sample is PHP. Though I seem to remember Eclipse having support for CTRL+/ style block commenting/uncommenting. Most other good IDEs (and emacs, as noted below) do it too.

But yeah, I sometimes take for granted how nice VS.NET is at these little detail things (though I use resharper-style CTRL+/ bindings for this particular feature). Thanks to this author and his pain for reminding me how good we have it.

[mixmax]

It's probably telling that his code sample is PHP

Excuse me, but last time I checked PHP was one of the most widely deployed languages in the world, which a lot of people smarter than you and I spend their working time hacking. Can we please stop the PHP bashing.

[bkudria]

(Disclaimer: I work in PHP)

PHP is popular. But the language sucks. Big-time. Popularity does not mean something is automatically good, in a technical sense.

[mixmax]

Absolutely agree, and judging by the score of my parent comment maybe I didn't make myself clear.

I don't mean to say that PHP is a perfect language by any means, far from it. My point was more that just because some code example is written in PHP you can't automatically infer that the code is inferior. I personally think that's terribly arrogant, but that may just be me.

[moe]

My point was more that just because some code example is written in PHP you can't automatically infer that the code is inferior.

Perhaps I'm terribly arrogant but I do make that inference. Simply because the number of good coders who would pick PHP when given a choice is very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very small. And shrinking.

[mixmax]

Most coders don't have the choice.

I'm sure that if it was up to the programmers many big sites would be hacked out in Haskell, but as it is an awful lot of them happen to be done in PHP. And Coders have jobs and bosses.

[moe]

On their personal blog?

[jasonkester]

I didn't intend any PHP bashing. I was just pointing out that PHP is quite a way behind in the IDE department. Apart from some half-hearted Eclipse plugins like PDT, nobody has stepped up to the plate. Certainly not in the way that Netbrains did for Java or MS did for .NET.

I've done my share of PHP development over the years, and have clients to this day that need their PHP sites maintained. And every time I need to touch those sites, I wish I had a tool powerful as, say, ColdFusion Studio 4.5, which came out in 2001.

If you can point out such a development environment for PHP, I'd be quite grateful.

[philwelch]

So was (is?) COBOL.

[latortuga]

Not to mention TextMate, e (the windows textmate clone) and vi...I feel like this is a pretty basic text editor feature, for programmers at least.

[rwolf]

For the gedit kids feeling left out in the audience, check out the plugin "code comment". Who loves you, baby?